IS JAKE ADAM YORK THE NICEST GUY IN PO-BIZ?

Could very well be. In fact, that's probably damning him with faint praise. We had him down (over?) to the Magic City last night to speak and read to an audience of high school literary arts award winners. He read from his latest book, A Murmuration of Starlings. Powerful, affecting stuff chronicling the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. Couple that with his unpretentious but unmistakable intellect and his all-around menschiness, and a whole bunch of young Alabama writers now have oodles of legitimacy when they say, "Mom, dad...I want to be a poet." Okay, not oodles. Tough for any aspiring poet to have oodles of anything, with the possible exception of noodles. But now they can say it's possible and it's important and there are, in fact, cool people who've taken that path. Check out Jake's blog while you're at it....